“Mark Sin­gle­ton is one of the most valu­able, vocal and artic­u­late advo­cates for yoga prac­ti­tion­ers and yoga schol­ars to put aside their dif­fer­ences and engage the ques­tions that bear upon their shared inter­ests. His writ­ing and teach­ing pro­vide a bridge between the con­cerns of acad­e­mia and those of practice.”

Susan Maier-​​Moul, the MoY edi­tor, takes advan­tage of the online for­mat to have an extended chat and dig into the most reveal­ing aspects of Singleton’s stud­ies. The first part is about the con­cept of “cul­tural trans­la­tion,” which is key to under­stand­ing the trans­for­ma­tion that yoga under­goes as it is trans­planted to the United States and Europe. This con­cep­tual frame­work is needed to deci­pher the polit­i­cal and cul­tural forces, both inside and out­side India, that change yoga. This is also intel­lec­tual process which will offend many who think of yoga in “sacred” terms.

By under­stand­ing how we are tra­versed and con­structed by cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal sto­ries about the world, we can open up far richer avenues of mean­ing within our yoga prac­tice. Espe­cially when we com­bine this with a study of the other two con­texts (the philo­soph­i­cal frame­work around the text and the tra­di­tional commentaries).

Get­ting into a deep stretch in a Bryan Kest-​​led class at Thrive Yoga

The sec­ond part gets into the nitty gritty of yoga as a cul­tural phe­nom­e­non here in the United States and Europe and how we are chang­ing it, no mat­ter how faith­fully we try to read Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. We are going to project onto yoga our own pref­er­ences and prej­u­dices. This can affect how we view a par­tic­u­lar pos­ture or how we trans­late a text; Sin­gle­ton gives exam­ples of each of these facets.

Our own con­tem­po­rary under­stand­ings of yoga are sim­i­lar kinds of mix­tures. It’s for this rea­son that it’s prefer­able to speak of plural “yogas” rather than “yoga”in the sin­gu­lar. There is no sin­gle body of prac­tices called “yoga” (although there are cer­tainly dom­i­nant ones through his­tory). Mod­ern yogas are usu­ally very par­tic­u­lar and unique ren­der­ings, which often rad­i­cally depart from tra­di­tion. They are, in other words, translations.

As I read the tran­script my mind kept jump­ing back and forth between the inter­view and the book, and then skip­ping to the Bryan Kest class this week. In some respects the inter­view is a good pref­ace to the book because it strips away the aca­d­e­mic scaf­fold­ing and leaves. You can also read between the lines of Singleton’s responses to sense some of the cri­tiques that have been made against his conclusions.

Of course, I am actu­ally get­ting ahead of myself because I have already fin­ished read­ing the book, and need to record my thoughts here. More to come soon.

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about.me

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live - F. Sagan

I am a writer-editor and web entrepreneur, living in the Washington, DC area, fluent in English, Spanish and geek. I practice yoga and meditation to keep my head firmly attached to my body and my feet planted on the ground. Photography and classical music focus my mind. Got into technical proposal writing at DMI, an IT service integrator, about a year ago and now moving on to LCG.

I lived in Peru for 18 years, married, had a couple of kids, freelanced for major media, returned to the States, wrote two books, endured reverse culture shock, earned a MSc in IT, and then got into drugs (CICAD/OAS).